The L&A Hub

Welcome to The L&A Hub — where innovation in life insurance and annuities gets put to the test. Host Paul Tyler sits down with leaders from carriers, distributors, partners, and startups to break down the experiments, decisions, and systems driving real change in the life insurance and annuity industry. Learn what worked, what didn’t, what they learned — and what’s next. New episodes weekly. The Life and Annuity Hub. Brought to you by Zinnia.

The L&A Hub is a business podcast hosted by Zinnia, with 21 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Zinnia hosts The L&A Hub, a business show with 21 episodes published.

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  The L&A Hub

  Frank Chechel - The Robots Took All the Easy Cases

  Aug 7, 202643 min

  Frank Chechel — VP and Head of Individual Life Underwriting at Gen Re, and an actuary who "fell into" underwriting a decade ago when a boss asked him to build an underwriting R&D team — makes the case that after a hundred years, underwriting is only just scratching the surface. He and Paul trace how COVID flipped accelerated underwriting from a nice-to-have experiment into an overnight mandate, why wellness programs went quiet during the pandemic and are now roaring back, and how to think about AI in three distinct layers: predictive models, generative summarization, and the still-early agentic frontier. Frank is refreshingly blunt about the limits — a document summary that's 95% accurate is "a good way to get fired," and the same alcohol-related case put in front of five underwriters can produce five different answers. His through-line: the robots are taking the easy declines and clean preferred risks, which makes the human underwriter's job harder, not obsolete. The future underwriter lives in the gray zone and is fluent in data. Along the way — standing-room-only GLP-1 webinars, why bad data management hamstrings even the best data scientists, and Gen Re's own Claude pilot building a unified underwriting knowledge base.

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  The L&A Hub

  Josh Hershman - Break Some Dishes

  Jul 24, 202639 min

  Josh Hershman has done something almost no one in insurance regulation has done: he's been a private attorney, a deputy commissioner, the executive director of an open-source data standards project, and the CEO of a life insurance company — all before Governor Lamont named him Connecticut's Insurance Commissioner. That resume gives him a vantage point on AI that most regulators don't have, and he uses it. In this episode he explains how Connecticut is already running AI inside the department (a state Copilot license, financial-exam document review, letter drafting) and why the hardest part is change management, not technology. He borrows the EU's tiered, consumer-impact framework to argue carriers should "break some dishes" on internal use cases while moving carefully on anything that approves or denies a claim — but still moving. He and Paul get into why annuity illustrations are the single most tailor-made AI use case in the industry, how McCarran-Ferguson and the NAIC's slow "model act" machinery actually shape the rules, and why the word "testing" in the AI model bulletin is leaving carriers frozen. Listeners come away with a regulator's actual map of what to build fast, what to build carefully, and what to bring to a statehouse versus the NAIC.

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  The L&A Hub

  Chris Orestis - There's No Account With Your Name On It

  Jul 17, 202634 min

  Chris Orestis has spent 30 years — first as a Capitol Hill and White House staffer, then as a three-time company founder — trying to fix the equation American families face when long-term care hits. In this conversation, he explains why only about 7 million long-term care insurance policies exist across a population of 340 million, why "care creep" quietly turns family members into unpaid full-time caregivers, and why Medicaid should be a family's payer of last resort, not their plan of first resort. He and Paul dig into the harder math underneath the headlines: the Social Security and Medicare trust funds' insolvency date has moved up from 2035 to 2032, and nothing meaningful will happen in Washington until after the 2028 election. Chris lays out the likely fix — higher earner contributions, means testing, and a possible increase to full retirement age — and makes the case that annuities, hybrid life/LTC and products are the industry's best answer to a shrinking safety net. The conversation closes on AI: why consumers are souring on bots, why AI-enabled fraud against seniors is exploding, and why verifying that an agent is a real, licensed human may be the industry's next big trust play.

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  The L&A Hub

  Jeff Tulloch - Why Financial Wellness Education Never Worked

  Jul 10, 202632 min

  Jeff Tulloch spent 25 of his 30 years in insurance at MetLife, where he built PlanSmart into one of the industry's first true enterprise financial wellness programs — reaching roughly 40% of the Fortune 500 and millions of employee interactions before he went independent five years ago. In this conversation, he traces the category from a static library of articles and videos that nobody opened ("it just sat there") to today's metrics-driven model, where vendors have to prove people are actually reducing debt, building emergency savings, or raising retirement contributions — not just logging in. He connects a PwC finding that 59% of employees are still stressed about day-to-day finances to a bigger claim: financial stress may be the root cause of the physical and mental wellness problems employers spend far more money trying to solve. Plus: the the turf standoff with a 401(k) provider that became a case study in complementary benefits design, why "Uber-level personalization" is coming for workplace financial education, and what three decades of watching brokers navigate benefit bloat taught him about what actually earns trust.

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  The L&A Hub

  Tina Beckwith - Marketing Lifetime Income in the Age of AI

  Jun 26, 202631 min

  Tina Beckwith, CMO of LIMRA and LOMA, debriefs the inaugural Best Minds Retirement Symposium and explains why the industry can only fix the annuity perception problem together. She unpacks a counterintuitive discovery — that AI is scraping the industry's own myth-busting content and surfacing the myths as fact — makes the case for plain language over jargon, and argues annuity awareness should be always-on, not a single month.

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